Saturday, 11 September 2010

Bands' careers in 140 characters or less

Iran denies 'secret atomic plant'

The Robo Porn of Kathy McGinty

The girl on the other end of the phone tells you “I’m all fucked up from huffing Scotch Guard,” “I might be having a miscarriage” and “Satan controls my robotic vagina.” Not exactly music to the ears of a horny as hell john looking to indulge in a spot of phone sex. But generally they carry on regardless, beating their meat to the beat, the hapless victims of this voyeuristic crank-call collection.

Originally released in 2001 as a CD-R and later bootlegged by an unscrupulous L.A. record label, Kathy McGinty (the brainchild of pranksters Derek Erdman and Julia Rickert) has finally been pressed as a CD, complete with new liner notes and six bonus tracks.

It documents calls made to a fake sex line, promising live interaction with Kathy McGinty, a nubile young nympho, but all that greets the would be sex seekers is a recorded voice triggered by a Yahama SU-10 sampler. The sheer ridiculousness and comic value of Kathy’s responses are equally matched by (a) the sheer incredulity of the callers and (b) their inability to admit the obvious, namely that they’ve been had. When Kathy seemingly orgasms into ecstatic oblivion at the slightest provocation (“Hello, is that Kathy?”) or starts conversing in tongues, a whoring hostage to the devil, the game should be up. But these guys are so desperate to get their rocks off that even the knowledge that their liaison is with a minor (“I’m 12 years old”) doesn’t prevent them from pumping the pork sword (“I’m not a child molester, but I’ll fuck you”).

The majority of callers are sexually aggressive creatures, declaring how they are going to fuck McGinty hard in the arse, etc. It is easy to imagine exactly the type of men they are and it’s difficult to have much sympathy for them, but there are a few exceptions. One caller takes a more romantic approach – when asked what he would like to do to Kathy he responds “I would kiss you on the forehead, put my hands through your hair and kiss the sides of your face.” Cue multiple McGinty orgasm frenzy. His poor little soul crushed.
@'Seedy'

jayrosen_nyu The Times UK paywall is back up. According to AdAge's @natives, the Times people said it was down "for maintenance." Do we believe that?

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let's stop fulfilling bin Laden's goals

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration's initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective -- a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared "mission accomplished," with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda's leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

But the insidious thing about terrorism is that there is no such thing as absolute security. Each incident provokes the contemplation of something worse to come. The Bush administration convinced itself that the minds that conspired to turn passenger jets into ballistic missiles might discover the means to arm such "missiles" with chemical, biological or nuclear payloads. This became the existential nightmare that led, in short order, to a progression of unsubstantiated assumptions: that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; that there was a connection between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden had nothing to do with fostering these misconceptions. None of this had any real connection to 9/11. There was no group known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" at that time. But the political climate of the moment overcame whatever flaccid opposition there was to invading Iraq, and the United States marched into a second theater of war, one that would prove far more intractable and painful and draining than its supporters had envisioned.

While President Obama has, only recently, declared America's combat role in Iraq over, he glossed over the likelihood that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will have to remain there, possibly for several years to come, because Iraq lacks the military capability to protect itself against external (read: Iranian) aggression. The ultimate irony is that Hussein, to keep his neighbors in check, allowed them and the rest of the world to believe that he might have weapons of mass destruction. He thereby brought about his own destruction, as well as the need now for U.S. forces to fill the void that he and his menacing presence once provided.

As for the 100,000 U.S. troops in or headed for Afghanistan, many of them will be there for years to come, too -- not because of America's commitment to a functioning democracy there; even less because of what would happen to Afghan girls and women if the Taliban were to regain control. It has to do with nuclear weapons. Pakistan has an arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear warheads. Were any of those to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda's fundamentalist allies in Pakistan, there is no telling what the consequences might be.

Again, this dilemma is partly of our own making. America's war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam. A muscular Islamic fundamentalism is gaining ground there and threatening the stability of the government, upon which we depend to guarantee the security of those nuclear weapons. Since a robust U.S. military presence in Pakistan is untenable for the government in Islamabad, however, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are likely to remain parked next door in Afghanistan for some time.

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, "black sites,"
extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military so overstretched that one of the few growth industries in our battered economy is the firms that provide private contractors, for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for BBC World News America.

@'Washington Post'

HA!

Love the way that Buchanan puts down Obama!!!

(NB:Sarcasm)

The pastor and cheap, selective concern for "blood-spilling"

Spaceboy - lucky you like yr veggies eh?

Bear in mind that Spaceboy will choose Brussell Sprouts as his vegetable-of-choice!!!

Congressman: BP "Openly Blackmailing the American Government"

I Was with Coco

Never mind the conflict, let's report the Parliament

Pekar

Fury in Austria at anti-mosque game

A far-right party in Austria has sparked outrage by launching an online video game which allows players to shoot down minarets and muezzins calling for prayer.

The game, called "Moschee Baba", or "Bye Bye Mosque", gives players 60 seconds to collect points by placing a target over cartoon mosques, minarets and Muslims and click a "Stop" sign.

It is being used by the Freedom Party (FPOe), which has a link to the game on its website, to encourage voters to elect Gerhard Kurzmann, the party's candidate in the picturesque region of Styria.

"Game Over. Styria is now full of minarets and mosques!" it says at the end of a session, before inviting players to vote for Kurzmann on September 26, when local elections are being held.

The website then invites viewers to take part in a survey which asks them whether the construction of minarets and mosques should be banned in Austria, and whether Muslims should sign a declaration in which they accept that the law takes precedence over the Quran.

According to the Austria Press Agency there are no mosques with minarets in Styria, where 1.6 per cent of the population is Muslim, and only four such buildings in the entire country.

'Religious hatred'

Anas Schakfeh, the leader of Austria's Islamic community, has described the game as "tasteless and incomprehensible".

"This is religious hatred and xenophobia beyond comparison," he told Austrian broadcaster ORF.

Austria's Social Democrats and Green Party have joined the Islamic community in condemning the video.

"The FPOe is targeting minarets that don't even exist," Werner Kogler, the Green candidate in Styria, said.

The game also appears to have divided the FPOe camp, with its deputy, Manfred Haimbuchner, quoted as saying the party should "seek attention with substance, not with constant provocations".

However Herbert Kickl, the party secretary, defended the game saying it did not involve any real shooting, but rather "the pushing of a stop-button to halt a bad political decision."

European debate

The Islamic community and the Green party filed complaints for incitement of hatred and degrading of a religion on Wednesday, which can be punished with prison sentences of up to two years.

Prosecutors in Graz, the capital of Styria, have launched an inquiry and will decide whether to take the game off the Internet.

Islamic buildings and dress have sparked debates in many European countries recently, with French and Belgian MPs voting to outlaw the niqab, and Swiss voters backing a ban on building minarets.

Austria's Freedom Party wants a special vote on banning mosques with minarets and Islamic face veils.

Heinz-Christian Strache, its leader, has said he wants to see anti-Muslim protests similar to those in New York over the building of a Muslim cultural centre near the World Trade Center site.

The debate isn’t just coming from the right. In Germany central banker Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, has provoked uproar for saying that Muslim immigrants undermine German society, refuse to assimilate, and sponge off the state. He has also said “all Jews share a particular gene” angering people across the German community.

The Freedom Party said its “Bye bye Mosque” game was in part in reaction to Sarrazin’s comments saying they would prefer to have “Sarrazin rather than muezzin,” in Austria. Freedom wants to “deal with a situation which has already long been widespread in Europe,” Kurzmann said. He said young people needed to be informed about the problem.

With its catchy slogans and youthful leader, the Freedom Party enjoys strong support from young people in Austria, polling 17.5 percent of the vote at a national level in 2008.

@'Al Jazeera'

Saatchi and Saatchi and my part in their piss-up

To the Saatchi Gallery last night after a plaintive call from a Labour Saatchi person (oh yes, they exist) to say the Saatchi and Saatchi 40th anniversary bash was a bit of a Tory wipe out.

Hardly surprising, given its ‘Labour isn’t working’ role in helping Mrs T way back when and she and lots of her ministers were there – John Major, Ken Baker, Norman Lamont, John Wakeham among them – amid dozens of good-looking women from advertising clearly glad that ‘Mad Men’ was back on the screens.

In his speech, Maurice Saatchi was humble enough to say he owed his success in large part to the fact that Mrs Thatcher, now wheelchair-bound and rather frail-looking, if still with that unmistakeable hair, put her faith in the company he started with his brother Charles.

There were hundreds of people there, and it was too hot, but I had some very enjoyable ‘all our yesterdays’ chats with some of the politicians I used to cover as a journalist and then take on as a political campaigner.

Ken Baker seems to have aged the best. He was as irrepressibly upbeat and happy as ever, and gave me this piece of advice … ‘Never ever stop working’. I reminded him of a previous piece of advice he gave me, when Tony Blair hired me in 1994 … ‘Nobody can do that job for more than four years!’ He roared with laughter, said ‘you did well to ignore me, you sat at the TOP TABLE OF HISTORY and loved every minute.’ He waved away my protestations about how much I loved it.

Lots of them seemed to be reading, or have read, TB’s book, and were enjoying it. Lots were talking about Andy Coulson. His problem would seem to be a sense of disbelief (among politicians and journalists) that he had no idea the phone-hacking was taking place when he was editing the News of the World. Old heads now worry about whether David Cameron has ever sought to establish the truth himself, with an eyeball to eyeball chat with his communications director. Because if anything emerges to embarrass Coulson in any of the inquiries into all this, Cameron’s judgement will also become an issue. Interesting too how current Tory MPs were saying that the real issue was how widespread illegal practices may have been, and not just at the News of the World. Press regulation is definitely on the political agenda, and it could be Tory MPs pushing hardest for it.

Of the current Cabinet, I only saw Andrew Lansley, who said he was loving every minute of being Health Secretary. Good to see the NHS Direct campaign making progress incidentally. But not for the first time in a room full of political strategists, the most telling observation I heard was from Philip Gould.

He is as irrepressibly chirpy as Ken Baker. But I think he may be onto something when he says that between them the Tory Party and the media managed to persuade a lot of people that Britain had become a terrible place to live. It is not, it is a good place to live. But the cuts planned by the coalition government – George Osborne added a few more billion to them yesterday to make the BBC’s Nick Robinson feel good about driving up and down the A1 with a perspex box – will make it a much worse place to live for quite a lot of people who will suddenly realise they have lost things they valued.

That is the challenge Saatchi’s successors as Tory strategists should be thinking about. They do seem a bit sidetracked by Andy Coulson right now, but I think Philip has a point.

@'Alistair Campbell.org'